“Well, good-night, George,” said Guy, stepping out into the night.
“Good-night,” said George.
“Good-night, George,” said Monica. “Till to-morrow.”
“Till to-morrow,” echoed George dully, and walked back to the drawing-room where he had left the whisky decanter. The drawing-room door was locked.
“——” said George with emphasis, and went to bed.
Outside in the laurel bushes a dapper figure drew his thick overcoat about him and shivered in the cold night air. “Well, I’ll be hanged if I can make out who’s in it!” muttered the dapper figure, and also went home to bed.
And that, so far as we are concerned, was the end of Sunday. The drawing-room door, it is of no interest to record, remained locked until Monday. Until twenty minutes past Monday, to be precise.
George’s brain, it must be allowed (and George himself would have been the first to allow it) was not a subtle organ. It worked, much the same as a donkey-engine works; but there is little finesse about a donkey engine. During the early hours of the night George’s brain turned out for him a large number of straightforward schemes for arriving at Manstead the next morning without a passenger; but they were crude. George quite recognised that. The most ingenious was that he should start at six o’clock, before his passenger should so much as have opened an eyelid. Reluctantly George was compelled to reject even this. He had given his word, and unless a plan presented itself to involve the inevitable breaking of this inconvenient tie, and consistently with the ways of perfect gentility as George understood them, he must keep it. It is almost superfluous to add that no plan did present itself.
Perhaps Monica had caught something of the notable lack of warmth in George’s voice the previous evening. In any case, she was evidently leaving nothing to chance. A forty-mile motor trip was an event in Monica’s life, and Monica liked her life to be eventful. At half-past nine she presented herself on George’s front-doorstep, hatted, fur-coated and gauntlet-gloved, the complete motorist. George greeted her with ghastly geniality.
An impartial spectator, observing with pain George’s laboured attempts to appear hearty, would have said that George was hard to please. Monica looked the sort of passenger whom any right-minded, car-possessing bachelor would go miles out of his way to collect. Her pretty, eager face flushed with excitement, her tongue prattling merrily, and her trim, fur-encased figure very nearly jumping with pleasure, what better company could such a right-minded man desire? George was evidently not right-minded. His face, as he walked uneasily at Monica’s side towards the station, bore an expression of mingled apprehension and gloom; he looked as if he strongly suspected Monica of having a hose-pipe concealed somewhere about her person. George need not have bothered. Monica had few things concealed about her person, and certainly not a hose-pipe. A young woman with any pretence to fashion seldom wears a hose-pipe in these days.